doing anything to attract Republicans,
and, though he wouldn't take any
specific actions, he generally supported
the strategy.
Graham asked Senator Lisa Mur-
kowski, of Alaska, to write the drilling
language. Murkowski was up for
reëlection and would soon be facing a
primary against a Sarah Palin-backed
Tea Party candidate. Her price for
considering a climate-change bill with
John Kerry's name attached to it was
high: she handed over a set of ideas for
drastically expanding drilling, which
included a provision to open the Arc-
tic National Wildlife Refuge to oil
companies. Democrats had spent de-
cades protecting ANWR, and even Gra-
ham didn't support drilling there. But
he passed the Murkowski language on
to his colleagues to see how they would
react.
The K.G.L. coalition had two theo-
ries about how to win over Republicans
and moderate Democrats. One was to
negotiate directly with them and offer
them something specific for their sup-
port. After a year of that method, the
coalition had one Republican, and its
next most likely target wanted to drill in
ANWR. Other Republicans were slip-
ping away. Shortly before Thanksgiv-
ing, George LeMieux, of Florida, ap-
proached Graham in the Senate gym
and expressed interest in joining K.G.L.
"Let me teach you something about this
town," Graham told him. "You can't
come that easy." Graham was trying to
give the new senator some advice, ac-
cording to aides involved with the nego-
tiations: LeMieux would be foolish to
join the effort without extracting some-
thing for himself:
But LeMieux didn't have the chance
to try that, as he soon became another
casualty of Republican primary politics.
He had been appointed by the Florida
governor, Charlie Crist, who was then
running in a tight Republican primary
for the seat against another Tea Party fa-
vorite, Marco Rubio. LeMieux couldn't
do anything that would complicate
Crist's life. In a private meeting with
the three senators in December, he told
them that he couldn't publicly associate
himself with the bill. But, according to
someone who was present, he added,
"My heart's with you."
As for Olympia Snowe, the moder-
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 11,2010
ate Republican from Maine, who was
known for stringing Democrats along
for months with vague promises of join-
ing their legislative efforts, she seemed
to have a new demand every time Kerry,
Graham, and Lieberman sat down with
her. She also made it clear that granting
her wishes-everything from exempt-
ing home heating oil from greenhouse-
gas regulations and permanently pro-
tecting Georgià s Bank, a Maine fishery,
from drilling-would not guarantee her
support. She had used similar tactics to
win concessions in Obamàs health-care
bill, which she eventually voted against.
"She would always say that she was in-
terested in working on it," a person in-
volved in the negotiations said, "but she
would never say she was with us."
Another prospect was Susan Collins,
the other Republican from Maine. She
was the co-sponsor of a separate climate
bill, with Maria Cantwell, a Democrat
from Washington. Their bill, known as
"cap-and-dividend"-the government
would cap carbon emissions and use
revenue from polluters to compensate
taxpayers for energy-rate hikes-gained
some environmental support. Kerry,
Graham, and Lieberman believed that
the bill was unworkable and was steal-
ing valuable attention from their effort.
They spent months trying to figure out
how to kill it and win over Collins.
Eventually, Graham and Lieberman's
offices devised a ruse: they would adopt
a crucial part of the Cantwell-Collins
bill on market regulation in the official
bill. Then they would quiedy swap it out
as the legislation made its way to the
Senate floor. Collins, however, never
budged.
The second theory about how to
win the Republicans' support was to go
straight to their industry backers. If the
oil companies and the nuclear industry
and the utilities could be persuaded to
support the legislation, then they would
lobby Republicans. Rosengarten called
the strategy "If you build it, they will
come." This was the strategy Obama
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used to pass health care. He sent his
toughest political operatives-like
Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina-to
cut deals with the pharmaceutical in-
dustry and hospitals, which at key points
refrained from attacking the bill. (The
pharmaceutical industry actually ran ads
thanking Harry Reid for passing the
bill.) In early 2010, K.G.L. shifted its
focus from the Senate to industry.
O n January 20, 2010, the three sen-
ators sat down in Kerry's office
with Tom Donohue, the president of
the Chamber of Commerce, perhaps
the most influential interest group
in Washington. Donohue, who has
headed the Chamber since 1997, had in
that period helped kill several attempts
to pass climate-change legislation.
In most K. G .L. meetings, Kerry led
off with some lengthy remarks. "He
opened every meeting we had with a
ten- to thirty-minute monologue on cli-
mate change," one of the aides involved
said. ''Just whatever was on his mind.
There were slight variations. But never
did the variations depend on the person
we were meeting with."
That day, Kerry had something
specific to offer: preëmption from car-
bon being regulated by the E.P.A.
under the Clean Air Act, with few
strings attached. Kerry asked Donohue
if that was enough to get the Chamber
to the table. 'We'll start working with
you guys right now," Donohue said. It
was a promising beginning. Soon after-
ward, Rosengarten and two of Dono-
hue's lobbyists worked out the legislative
text on preëmption. The Chamber was
allowed to write the language of its top
ask into the bill. It turned out that work-
ing with Washington interest groups
was far simpler than dealing with Re-
publican senators navigating a populist
conservative uprising.
Three weeks later, Kerry and some
aides were in his office discussing the
progress of their bill. Someone men-
tioned T. Boone Pickens, the author of
the so-called Pickens Plan, an energy-
independence proposal centered on
enormous government subsidies for
natural gas, which is abundant, cleaner-
burning than other fossil fuels, and sold
by a Pickens-controlled corporation at
some two hundred natural-gas fuelling
stations across North America. Back in